This book is a defence of Modernism against its defenders. In readings of modern design, film, pop and especially architecture, it attempts to reclaim a revolutionary modernism against its absorption into the heritage industry and the aesthetics of the luxury flat.

Militant Modernism features new readings of some familiar names — Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, et al. — but more on the lesser-known, quotidian modernists of the twentieth century. These chapters range from a study of British industrial and brutalist aesthetics to Russian Constructivism in architecture, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and screen — all arguing for a modernism of everyday life, immersed in questions of socialism, sexual politics, and technology.